Entering the Lena River Delta, 1881

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 316-318: THE LENA RIVER originates nearly three thousand miles to the south of the Arctic Ocean, in a mountain range near Lake Baikal in the deep interior of Russia, not far from the border with Mongolia. As the river flows through the forested solitudes of Yakutia, it picks up tributary after tributary—the Kirenga, the Vitim, the Olekma, the Aldan, the Vilyui. The Lena is the world’s eleventh-longest river, draining the world’s ninth-largest watershed, a boggy, mosquitoey swath of tundra and taiga that measures more than 960,000 square miles. The amount of sediment carried by the Lena is extraordinary—and the river’s enormous power discharges a plume of silt and debris more than fifty miles out into the Arctic Ocean. The Lena, like only a few of the world’s largest river systems, flows northward, toward a mostly frozen sea. In the fall, it begins…